CoreWeave Inc., the operator of a cloud platform optimized for artificial intelligence workloads, today filed to go public.

The company plans to sell 49 million shares for between $47 and $55 apiece. On the high end of the range, the initial public offering would value CoreWeave at $26 billion. Bloomberg reported today that the cloud provider had originally sought to raise up to $4 billion at a $35 billion valuation.

CoreWeave hosts more than 250,000 Nvidia Corp. graphics cards in 32 data centers worldwide. It’s among the few cloud providers that offer the Blackwell B200, the chipmaker’s latest and most capable AI accelerator. It also provides workstation-grade Nvidia graphics cards optimized for rendering tasks.

The company says that its platform provides better performance for AI workloads than the major public clouds. According to its IPO filing, Llama 3.1 can be trained on its platform with 3.1 million fewer graphics card hours than on an unnamed competing cloud. The company also promises to significantly speed up related tasks such as loading LLMs onto Nvidia chips.

CoreWeave has developed several custom software tools for its platform. One of them, SUNK, promises to help enterprises make their cloud-hosted AI environments more efficient.

Companies often use Kubernetes to power their inference workloads and another open-source tool, Slurm, to carry out AI training. The two tools usually have to be deployed on separate server clusters. SUNK makes it possible to run Slurm on Kubernetes, which removes the need for customers to maintain two separate server clusters. 

CoreWeave’s feature set has helped it win deals with several major tech firms. The company counts OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc., IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. among its customers. The latter company accounted for 62% of the $1.9 billion in revenue that CoreWeave generated last year.

It has experienced rapid sales growth since the release of ChatGPT. Its revenue jumped 737% in 2024 and 1,346% the year before that. CoreWeave is spending heavily to keep up its top line momentum: Its loss widened from $594 million in 2023 to $594 million last year.

In today’s IPO filing, CoreWeave detailed that it plans to maintain revenue growth by expanding its international presence. The company also intends to launch industry-specific offerings for segments such as the banking sector where it expects AI demand to increase. “Although it is early, we have already started to see strong interest from such industries,” it stated in the filing.

The company’s plan to boost its financial performance could also involve changes to its data center construction strategy. 

Currently, CoreWeave leases most of its cloud facilities. Its IPO filing states that it “may make investments” to take more ownership stakes in its data centers.” It hopes that “this will enable us to have more control and accountability over the delivery timeline of new builds, and allow us to exert more control over our data center costs.” Lowering infrastructure costs could help the company move closer to profitability.

CoreWeave will list its shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol CRWV.

Photo: CoreWeave